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What have you learnt? Describe a key discovery from the lecture program? Do you see the connection with these ideas and your developing practice? Explain that connection. Are these 20th Century ideas still relevant in the 21st Century? What ideas and movements would a similar lecture program about 21st Century culture include?

During those lectures I have been able to learn more about the history of Art & Design not only in a sense of understanding how the actions happened but also by raising discussions over those facts and how they relate either between themselves or with the contemporary questions. I have been able to understand more about the way graphic design behaves the way it does today and how the styles and references act they way they do and if I ever use them in any of my works which meanings will they carry as a baggage. And, yes those ideas are really important for the 21st Century because they have molded the way society behaves now and are the base for many actions and artistic purposes we have nowadays. But if we are talking about the 21st Century, we would need to talk about the Motion Graphics and the rise of Animation, that is also very related to the “design for specific time” which are the creation of contents for a specific happening during a small period of time, not forgetting the new wave of mixed media that arts is using.

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Barbara Kruger - On Photography

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Barbara Kruger

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Describe a key idea or theory from post modernism.

 With the death of a production method, a death of the styles, has created the new world where everything is associated with language, a world post medium, where the understandment is becoming about the message not where it is placed. Since all of the information is coming towards us with the readiness and the urgency of being understood, we created a need of getting everything being subjective. The message is supposed to be direct. This supposed subjectivity is product of a society that is used to ubiquity and confronts us as if from the outside with all the sensory experience of the history of humanity. It is as if we have amputated not our ears or our eyes, but ourselves, and then established a total prosthesis – an automaton – in our place. If we take into consideration what Barbara Kruger says about how critics say about her own work where they believe and see more about the incorporated ideas rather than just looking at the message and language there explicitly said. “Critics always focus on the fine art/Constructivism end of my work, rather than thinking that this was somebody who had a job, who had a training in cropping photographs and who pasted words over them. And those words, when you were in a layout department, didn’t say anything they just said, “A,B,C,D,E,F,G”. My job afterwards as an artist, in many ways was to make that sort of device meaningful.”

Can you explain the significance of this idea to contemporary culture? 

We have become a society that can’t process a single message without doubting it, and trying to find the trace of where it comes and became. This idea is supposed to be ignored when thinking that everything is language and how the idea of evolution towards a purpose of leaving the aspects separate (medium, language and message) so we analyze them separate to think of it as a whole. Well, the medium is the message, but this does not mean and never meant that the content of the medium is a conscious reflection on itself.1 To acquire the status of serious conveyors of ideas, images still have to overcome a 'class struggle' with verbal language3 and we are still trying to get a sense into this idea and grip the concept so we can become a society that makes those reflections by themselves at any times we come in front of language – which is all the time.

References:

https://www.wired.com/1996/01/channeling/

http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/barbara-kruger

http://www.eyemagazine.com/opinion/article/a-rhetoric-of-images

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Jimi Hendrix: Purple Haze Live

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Jimi Hendrix: Fire

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Victor Moscoso

The Miller Blues Band

1967

Medium: Lithograph

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How did alternative culture borrow from the visual ideas preceding generations?

Alternative culture rose with the “baby boomers” who questioned America’s materialism and conservative cultural and political norms. By the world being divided into two blocks – socialism and capitalism – a culture that emerges among the poor people later on starts to become part of the white rich main society. By redefining the culture, the experimentation becomes the main point of the alternative. The visual motifs of psychedelic art include Art Nouveau-inspired curvilinear shapes, illegible hand-drawn type, candy intense optical color vibration inspired by the pop art movement.1 Pop was a term first applied to popular culture rather than to art, but it would be one of the goals of the Popart movement to blur the boundaries between ‘high’ art and ‘low’ popular culture. Among other characteristics, Op Art was also a place of borrowing visuals that the alternative culture got from. Getting the main aesthetics points and designs but not quite utilizing them in the same sense they were first decided onto, the Alternative Culture got the resemblance but also twisting in a very dirty erotic way. The erotica era began to take place in all fields of art, whether it was the design but specially in music. From poster design taken from Victor Moscoso where a women is the center figure – a Art Nouveau trait – with the lines contouring her body figure as an enhancement of that shape to Jimi Hendrix’s licking and playing the guitar and his faces made during any presentation, the sexual portrait of a culture that wants to use the pleasure as a main characteristic. 

Do you feel this was problematic? If so why? 

I wouldn’t say problematic, I would say it was a bold action. The twist of the visual ideas created the sense of evilness that this alternative culture would begin to have as a trait. More than the inner eye, the outer view—and cultural code—was what categorised and embodied the experience and continues to do so.2 It seems like this appropriation of the visual ideas turned them into a unique approach, so it doesn’t portrait as a copy, but more as audacious trait that challenges the usual and the culture that was installing in the society. 

References: 

https://visualartsdepartment.wordpress.com/psychedelic-60s/

http://www.printmag.com/design-inspiration/acid-aesthetic-history-of-psychedelic-design/

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Lygia Clark: Baba Antropofágica 

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Where is, nowadays, that willing to transform everything, that willing to waste everything that generation of the 60s and 70s had? 

During the time of transformation that the 60s and 70s had in Brazil, we were passing through a time of becoming aware of who we were as individuals as a so we could understand who we are as a society. In the 1960s, Lygia Clark had put the body and perception at the heart of her undertaking, moving beyond the dichotomies of body/mind, subject/object, and individual/collective and subtly creating a way of being in the world that was part of the overall rhythm of things, wordlessly, in what she called a “mute thought.” 

Those propositions were part of an awakening of the body conscious, in a way each stage of her research led to the next, often at the cost of a personal crisis, as if, animated by a life with powers of its own, she was the product of a generative process. The only thing that matters,” she wrote, “is the act-in-progress.” The viewer then becomes an author, or rather, the agent of a perception defined by the act.1 We become our own conscious and it is the action of the individual that becomes an agent of how we should rethink the parameters (of us and our culture). 

Has the country established such a good and powerful culture that it is no longer necessary for us to be aggressive in cultural terms? 

No. The Brazilian culture has become actually even more aggressive on the approach of the political facts rather than anything else. We become mass producers of political art, that the design and arts now starts to be used into posters and media promotion of the calls for action or the explicit part of the problems that are rising. At the same time, we don’t have the same energy or conscious that Lygia Clark proposed with her work, now it is not the time to become aware of our individuals so we become a whole, we are a whole but we can’t act as it, so it is also not an option for the culture now to look at the past from 60s and 70s and try to come back with this same line of though and art creation.

References: 

https://post.at.moma.org/content_items/1005-part-1-lygia-clark-at-the-border-of-art

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Dieter Rams: Less and More Interview

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Dieter Rams: Ten principles for Good Design

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What were Dieter Rams 10 principles of Good Design?

With the role of design already stabilised as creation and function during that time, Dieter Rams and his consumer products company Braun introduced the world to “functionalist” industrial design, that means every decision about the object (shape, texture, cost etc) is made to maximize the objects capacity to fulfil its intended purpose.1 

Good design is innovative But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

Good design makes a product useful It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. 

Good design is aesthetic But only well-executed objects can be beautiful 

Good design makes a product understandable At best, it is self-explanatory. 

Good design is unobtrusive Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression. 

Good design is honest It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. 

Good design is long lasting It lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society. 

Good design is thorough down to the last detail Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user. 

Good design is environmentally friendly It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product. 

Good design is as little design as possible Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials.  

Do you feel that these ideas are relevant today? 

Living in the modern paced world we have nowadays we need to start rethinking about the ideas of any principles that based the way of life and producing we have, it is important to see that often these renovations become seen as disruptive or even a breakout from the past, but what we need to focus instead is how we can create the new rules and settings already incorporating the past principles. We have started to think design in the new sectors it is being applied into, so right now, it’s still borrowing the same qualitative values from the commercial sector. Conventional design work that serves the needs of business has a very different set of values and goals, and logically has its own criteria for what good is. We need to be able to set the Dieter Rams principles as a ground rule, but not as a strict purpose of a designer’s job. The baggage any society and public has needs to be taken into account when the project is being made and developed. Design thus has become a media event and we have a considerable number of publications that serve as resonance boxes for this process.

The new mediums made taken from design create the new expectation of sensing that we need new boundaries and proposals. The advocates of Good Design pursued socio-pedagogical objectives, while the life style centers of today pursue exclusively commercial and marketing aims to provide orientation for consumption patterns of a new -or not that new - social segment of global character.  

So it would make sense that we can learn from other disciplines that are equally attuned to human behavior. 

Good design learns from anthropology 

Good design learns from social work 

Good design learns from community organizing

References: 

https://hackernoon.com/dieter-rams-10-principles-of-good-design-e7790cc983e9

https://designobserver.com/feature/its-time-to-define-what-good-means-in-our-industry/40021

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25224045

https://www.vitsoe.com/gb/about/good-design

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The Clog Maker’s Apprentice | Tales of Forgotten Crafts

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What is the meaning of decoration for the Arts & Crafs movement?

From the thoughts of the processes taken upon the creation of a furniture piece by what Morris’ started as the Arts & Crafts Movement, we see that the importance of knowing every step was the main resource of pleasure the craftsman had while doing their job. With that, the decorative job arose by just simply being a piece of complement on the environment towards a more personified, almost exclusively made product. “And I would rather do the work twice over with my own hands than have such job,” said Morris about the industrial methodology of production compared to his understandment of how a craftsman work should behave. Furthermore, the decorative was also shaped to sharpen our dull senses, as the objects produced and put on inside the civilian’s homes should make one relax, taking out the rapid, quickly pace of the outside. “Look as natural, nay as lovely, as the green field, the river bank, or the mountain flint.” Including, moreover, the decoration that is applied into the sense of the making of the product, the patterns designed to the pieces all related to the nature is some aspect, being faithful as a product of nature, expanding from the smaller scale into bigger palpable artefacts – even if this scale is somehow exaggerated the relationship between the person and the object is never lost. This saying from a lecture from Dr Paul O'Keeffe, where he says:

I bethink me that amongst other things this lady said to me: 'You know, I wouldn't mind a lad being a cabinetmaker if he only made "Art" furniture.' Well, there you see! she naturally, as a matter of course, admitted what I have told you this evening is a fact, that even in a craft so intimately connected with fine art as cabinet making there could be two classes of goods, one the common one, quite without art;1 

What the common agreement was saying it is that we people see furniture and arts on two separate things – decorative and art – and those two could not be put in place together. During this time Morris then had the intention to bound these two in a sense of producing art from all its form and creating a piece that is functional, beautiful and an art from its pure sense.

Why does this movement want to intervene in the furniture, home design?

After a long day of working, the man walks back into his home and lays down his feet up upon his table while sitting down on the chair located in the center of the room. On a bright sunny Saturday afternoon, the family welcomes their guests on the living room – the guests compliment the space: ‘What a lovely home you have.” Furniture design talks bout the expression matter of a personality, the intention of how you want to show yourself to the others. In the 19th Century the way Arts & Crafts focused on the furniture design is more than just a craft handling activity, but a direct path of achieving the public’s mind. The movement’s reformers were concerned with the daily realities of the industrial age, and used design to envision and promote a new and improved way of living1 and the most achievable way of getting to the point of ways of living was through their homes – interior design. “Often we are told, as we are in Life Style, that design can give “style” to our “character” (…) Design is all about desire, (…) a new kind of narcissism.” Explicitly saying, Arts & Crafts had the intention of sharpening our dull senses that were being corrupted by the industrial purpose, which was got by the quickly easy way of making things in mass producing scale. And where are the people when they are not working? At home.2

References:

https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/podcasts/transcripts/arts_crafts_lecture.aspx 

https://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/2019/rise-of-everyday-design/